I have so many detectors right now, I need to thin out the herd, but I want to keep the best of the best, so I've been revisiting some of them I haven't used in a while to see if they'll make the cut or not.
I bought the Omega last fall, then a few weeks later got the F75 LTD. Initially I only put about 20 hours on the Omega, definitely not enough time to determine if it was a keeper or not IMHO, but I did get some initial impressions. My initial impressions about it were it's definitely light and the ergonomics are great compared to most machines. I found that it was very stable in high EMI environments whereas other machines tended to fall down. It was a chatter box when you set it down to dig, but with the coil in motion it's quite compared to some other high sensitivity machines. Oddly my last few trips I didn't notice the chatter when setting the machine down
I've been able to run it hot, sensitivity at 99 almost everywhere I've taken it, and typically I run the disc at 40 just to knock out iron, with either 3 or 4 tones, depending on where I'm hunting.
Lately I've been putting some more time on it, looking for those WOW moments. One thing that I really like is the discrimination circuit. I don't typically use much disc on my machines as I typically like to hear everything except small iron, but there are times when you either want to try your luck in a trashy park cherry picking silver, or take for instance our club hunts. They paint pennies, stamp 'em with numbers/letters and toss 'em out in the grass. There's really no skill involved in these seeded hunts, other then hauling azz and retrieving as many "tokens" as you can find. A couple of club hunts ago I took my F75 LTD, and on the first hunt it ran well (I found the most tokens too on the first round), but I set the disc too low and heard all the other junk in the ground at the park which was a distraction. Now on the LTD when you run high disc, the audio sounds terrible, it's all chopped up from the ultra digital processing going on. The second round of the same hunt using the LTD, the LTD got knocked out (darn Explorers
) and I could barely hear anything, and my token count plummeted. I've had that happen before with the LTD when hunting with Explorers/Etracs when they do their "noise cancel" and it lands on the same frequency as the LTD (and the LTD frequency shift doesn't fix it). Now when I hunt with an Explorer/ET buddy, I'll have them stand next to me and hit their noise cancel while I'm hitting my pinpointer trigger and that seems to get the Minelab to pick a frequency outside of the F75's and we can hunt close together without loss of performance. Unfortunately this isn't going to happen at a competition hunt with 50 other detectorisits. Last weekend was our annual "Maxi Hunt" and I thought I would try my Omega instead, as it's been super stable with EMI. Also I noticed when doing a few tests in the fields that high discrimination on the O8 doesn't chop up the audio like the LTD does, the disc works great on the Omega actually. I set the disc to just under zinc penny and the Omega was great at the competition hunt. I got 11 tokens, and only a few others got more, with the highest being 13. Now this is the Omega with the 11" DD against an army of folks with those giant 18" Bigfoot coils, BUT I think the Bigfoot coil probably weights almost as much as my Omega 
Thus far the Omega seems to be a capable machine, and instead of having WOW moments with it, I seem to have a lot of small reflections of interesting things it does different and/or better then some other machines. I'm not sold on it's depth so far, it just doesn't (in my soil) strike me as being a depth demon compared to my CZ-70 or F75 LTD, but maybe I just haven't wondered over that deep silver coin yet. The audio is telling on it, although I'm not 100% sure I like the audio on the deeper targets (would be nice if it had an audio boost like the CZ's have). The deepest target I've dug with the Omega was a 7.5" deep wheatback, and the audio was very faint/choppy, but enough to go for it (IIRC the TID was pretty stable though). This would seem to indicate if the penny was another half an inch or deeper the Omega probably wouldn't have picked it up. Would it go deeper on silver due to the lower frequency? I don't know. Most of the finds I've made with it have been 5" or less. The depth meter in pinpoint mode is pretty far off, but it does pinpoint nice.
Hopefully more time in the field will show if it's capable of CZ/LTD depths (here) and see what other advantages it holds over the other detectors in the stable.
HH,
Brian
I bought the Omega last fall, then a few weeks later got the F75 LTD. Initially I only put about 20 hours on the Omega, definitely not enough time to determine if it was a keeper or not IMHO, but I did get some initial impressions. My initial impressions about it were it's definitely light and the ergonomics are great compared to most machines. I found that it was very stable in high EMI environments whereas other machines tended to fall down. It was a chatter box when you set it down to dig, but with the coil in motion it's quite compared to some other high sensitivity machines. Oddly my last few trips I didn't notice the chatter when setting the machine down
I've been able to run it hot, sensitivity at 99 almost everywhere I've taken it, and typically I run the disc at 40 just to knock out iron, with either 3 or 4 tones, depending on where I'm hunting. Lately I've been putting some more time on it, looking for those WOW moments. One thing that I really like is the discrimination circuit. I don't typically use much disc on my machines as I typically like to hear everything except small iron, but there are times when you either want to try your luck in a trashy park cherry picking silver, or take for instance our club hunts. They paint pennies, stamp 'em with numbers/letters and toss 'em out in the grass. There's really no skill involved in these seeded hunts, other then hauling azz and retrieving as many "tokens" as you can find. A couple of club hunts ago I took my F75 LTD, and on the first hunt it ran well (I found the most tokens too on the first round), but I set the disc too low and heard all the other junk in the ground at the park which was a distraction. Now on the LTD when you run high disc, the audio sounds terrible, it's all chopped up from the ultra digital processing going on. The second round of the same hunt using the LTD, the LTD got knocked out (darn Explorers
) and I could barely hear anything, and my token count plummeted. I've had that happen before with the LTD when hunting with Explorers/Etracs when they do their "noise cancel" and it lands on the same frequency as the LTD (and the LTD frequency shift doesn't fix it). Now when I hunt with an Explorer/ET buddy, I'll have them stand next to me and hit their noise cancel while I'm hitting my pinpointer trigger and that seems to get the Minelab to pick a frequency outside of the F75's and we can hunt close together without loss of performance. Unfortunately this isn't going to happen at a competition hunt with 50 other detectorisits. Last weekend was our annual "Maxi Hunt" and I thought I would try my Omega instead, as it's been super stable with EMI. Also I noticed when doing a few tests in the fields that high discrimination on the O8 doesn't chop up the audio like the LTD does, the disc works great on the Omega actually. I set the disc to just under zinc penny and the Omega was great at the competition hunt. I got 11 tokens, and only a few others got more, with the highest being 13. Now this is the Omega with the 11" DD against an army of folks with those giant 18" Bigfoot coils, BUT I think the Bigfoot coil probably weights almost as much as my Omega Thus far the Omega seems to be a capable machine, and instead of having WOW moments with it, I seem to have a lot of small reflections of interesting things it does different and/or better then some other machines. I'm not sold on it's depth so far, it just doesn't (in my soil) strike me as being a depth demon compared to my CZ-70 or F75 LTD, but maybe I just haven't wondered over that deep silver coin yet. The audio is telling on it, although I'm not 100% sure I like the audio on the deeper targets (would be nice if it had an audio boost like the CZ's have). The deepest target I've dug with the Omega was a 7.5" deep wheatback, and the audio was very faint/choppy, but enough to go for it (IIRC the TID was pretty stable though). This would seem to indicate if the penny was another half an inch or deeper the Omega probably wouldn't have picked it up. Would it go deeper on silver due to the lower frequency? I don't know. Most of the finds I've made with it have been 5" or less. The depth meter in pinpoint mode is pretty far off, but it does pinpoint nice.
Hopefully more time in the field will show if it's capable of CZ/LTD depths (here) and see what other advantages it holds over the other detectors in the stable.
HH,
Brian